


in my head i do everything right

by ihopethatyouburn



Category: Homeland
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-08
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:28:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25140904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ihopethatyouburn/pseuds/ihopethatyouburn
Summary: What is sisterhood if not an invitation for constant competition?Shifting perspectives between Carrie and Maggie spanning from childhood to the present reveal the tensions that have always separated and connected them.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 11





	in my head i do everything right

1984 - 1994

Carrie’s first memory of Maggie being used as an example by someone other than her mother is during her first year of ballet class when she’s five years old. Class is in a tiny studio above a pizza shop, and the smell of pepperoni always drifts up through the floorboards during class. On nights when her mom is tired, she orders pizza for dinner to pick up on the way home from class. Her ballet teacher is on the older side — Carrie remembers her being ancient, but she’s probably in her fifties, old for a dancer but mostly just older than her parents and teachers at school. 

Even at five, Carrie realizes quickly that she isn’t good at ballet; there are too many rules, and the piano music is boring, and she can never get her feet to turn out to the side as far as the other girls can. The worst part, though, is that the teacher does everything so _slowly,_ and Carrie can’t understand why she gets yelled at for going through all the barre exercises faster than everyone else. Usually she’s able to keep it together, but on this particular day, she’d had enough, and complains to her friend Amanda, “This is so boring!”

She’d thought the staticky piano record would be loud enough to cover her complaining, but as luck would have it, Miss Kathy walks up behind them just then. 

“Carrie,” she says sternly. “We don’t tolerate that kind of talk in class.”

Carrie is used to getting reprimanded for one reason or another, usually when she decides on a different (and according to the teacher, wrong) arm placement for a certain exercise, so this doesn’t bother her much. But she doesn’t expect is what comes after: 

“When I had your sister, she was never this disruptive. Why can’t you be as quiet and helpful as Maggie?”

Carrie tells her mother about this embarrassment after class, crying tears of fury, but she gets no sympathy. “You can’t just call your dance class boring in front of the teacher. You know better than that,” her mom says, shaking her head as she drives back home.

She doesn’t even get pizza that night. 

Throughout her childhood and adolescence, comparisons to Maggie follow her wherever she goes. Eventually she grows to expect it, especially when they have the same teachers. 

“It’s not my fault Miss O’Neil still uses my science fair project as an example,” Maggie shrugs when Carrie complains that she’s following her everywhere. 

“Fine, but do you have to be so perfect all the time?” Carrie groans. “We end up with so many of the same teachers, and I’m always a disappointment.” 

Carrie is a solid student, exceptional when she puts her mind to it, but that’s only when she’s interested in what she’s learning, and seventh grade earth science isn’t appealing at all.

Instead of apologizing, or even pretending to care that Carrie is having a hard time, Maggie straightens up proudly at the word “perfect.” 

“You’re so annoying,” Carrie huffs as she stomps up the stairs away from her sister. 

Maggie isn’t withholding, and is always willing to help Carrie with her homework or projects when she needs it, but Carrie usually tries not to give her the satisfaction.

In middle school especially, Carrie starts to pull away from Maggie’s set path, picking field hockey over soccer as her travel sport, claiming that all her friends were playing field hockey. That is true, but she also just doesn’t want to deal with another coach calling her Mathison and never her first name because he associates her with Maggie. 

Of course, they have their good moments too, and once Carrie stops interacting as often with adults who have clear expectations of her performance based on what Maggie did three years previously, they don’t fight as much. They’re allied against their parents, who had seemed stable when Carrie was younger and didn’t think too hard about it, but now they spend a lot of late nights arguing over how controlling and judgemental her mom is, or how impulsive and irresponsible her dad is, or on really fun nights, both at the same time. 

Carrie’s instinct is to stay far away from her parents during these arguments and in the aftermath. She wants to let them work out their own shit and avoid being blamed for something innocuous that will inevitably be treated as a slight because everyone is already angry. Maggie, though, feels it’s her duty to talk quietly with both parents and make sure the argument is resolved. She’s always been good at keeping the peace, a natural moderator, but Carrie sees how it becomes a source of anxiety for her, another area of her life where her performance would be evaluated, where she could pass or fail.

They’re not particularly close growing up, especially not in high school, but once Maggie leaves for Georgetown, they tolerate each other much better. Even though she’s just a thirty minute drive away in DC, the physical distance and Maggie’s new environment give them more to talk about. Maggie calls home every few days at first, eager to discuss even inane topics, like their dad’s newest obsession with astronomy and a play-by-play of every goal at Carrie’s field hockey games (she’s a starter on varsity as a sophomore). She also opens up more than she ever had while she and Carrie were under the same roof, talking about classes being challenging, and debating whether she should rush a sorority since all the girls on her hall were going to. 

She calls Carrie in tears after getting a C on her first biology exam, spiraling about what it signals for her future. 

“What if this means I’m not cut out to be a doctor?” she wails.

Carrie feels strangely satisfied that Maggie fucked up so royally — as far as she knows, Maggie has never gotten a C on anything in her entire life. “Yeah, maybe you’re not,” she jokes. “This one test probably means you’re destined to work in a hospital billing department instead, chasing after people who can’t afford to pay the thousands of dollars they owe for life-saving surgeries.” 

“Carrie!” Maggie whines. “That is not helpful right now and you know it.”

“Fine, fine, sorry.” Carrie tries to hold in her laugh. “I’m sure you’ll do better on the next exam. How did your friends do?”

“Everyone else got As!”

“I’m sure not _everyone_ else got As. That’s impossible,” Carrie tries to reason, taking over Maggie’s usual role.

“The two girls I sit next to did,” Maggie sulks. “They both went to fancy boarding schools, I bet they learned all this stuff already.”

That answers Carrie’s question about why Maggie was complaining to her and not her friends. 

“Well, they sound annoying,” Carrie tries to cheer her up. She hears Maggie laugh weakly. 

Just then, Carrie hears their mom calling up the stairs about dinner. 

“I gotta go, Mags,” she says quickly. “It’s dinnertime and mom is already mad at me for not unloading the dishwasher like I was supposed to.” 

“You can’t just ignore Mom like that.” 

“I didn’t ignore her! I just forgot.”

“I can’t have you two killing each other while I’m gone,” Maggie warns.

“At least you’d have plausible deniability.”

“Shut up and go eat. Tell Mom and Dad I’ll call them tomorrow night.” 

“Fine,” Carrie sighs. “Go learn some biology, or something.” 

“Bye!” Maggie says with a smile in her voice. 

“Talk to you soon.” Carrie hangs up the landline and heads downstairs for dinner.

Carrie gets drunk for the first time when she goes to visit Maggie for Georgetown’s homecoming weekend. She can’t help but laugh in surprise and delight when Maggie shakes her awake at 8am to get ready for the first pregame of the day. 

“You don’t do this every weekend, do you?” Carrie asks in disbelief. 

“No, this is just what everyone does for homecoming. But it’s my first year, so I want to make sure I’m doing it right.”

Typical Maggie, trying her hardest at everything, even when the objective was just to get blackout drunk in broad daylight. They go to one of Maggie’s friend’s sorority houses — Maggie decided not to rush after all — and by 9:30am music is blasting from the speakers set up in the backyard, fairy lights woven into the bushes to make the space look more festive. 

Maggie’s friend Heather leads them over to a table set up with every kind of juice and soda imaginable, and pulls a bottle of tequila and a shot glass out of her tote bag. 

“Okay,” Maggie says, setting up plastic cups for the three of them. “Carrie, you only get one shot at a time, that’s the rule.”

“What? Says who?” Carrie protests, watching as Heather pours blindly into her own cup, filling it halfway to the top. 

“Says me. I’m not going to the hospital with you if you get alcohol poisoning.” Maggie measures out the shots efficiently (she gets two) and hands Carrie her cup to mix with whatever she chooses. 

“I’m not going to get alcohol poisoning,” Carrie rolls her eyes. “But you would too come with me if I went to the hospital.” 

“Just be smart, okay?” Maggie makes her promise. 

“Fine. Cheers?” She holds her cup up for Maggie to clink. 

“Cheers,” her sister grins.

The tequila doesn’t taste good, but she loves the warm emptiness that comes as she has more (carefully controlled by Maggie, always with a mixer added). Maggie starts dragging her around to different groups of people to say hello; Carrie can tell she’s enjoying that she has a built-in icebreaker. Everyone is nice, and the girls especially are effusive in their praise of her outfit, her new nose piercing, and the festive glitter eyeshadow Maggie applied for her.

She ends up in the kitchen, in a mostly inarticulate but passionate argument about Pulp Fiction with a douchey guy on the lacrosse team. She didn’t have strong opinions about the movie before today, but the mixture of the tequila and the beautiful know-it-all in front of her make her invent a barrage of reasons why she won’t be going to see it in theaters.

Maggie finds and interrupts her at the perfect moment when she runs out of things to say. 

“Hi!” Carrie greets her, throwing her arms around Maggie’s waist. “This is my sister Maggie,” she says to the guy, whose name she can’t remember for the life of her. “She actually goes here.”

“You mean you don’t go here?” the guy starts to back away, confused. 

“She’s fifteen,” Maggie informs him sweetly. After he turns swiftly and walks away, Maggie mutters, “Of course you’d disappear and end up with a hot guy hitting on you.”

“He definitely wasn’t hitting on me,” Carrie protests. “He was just telling me why I was wrong about something dumb.” 

“Whatever,” Maggie ignores her. “We’re going to another party now, come help me find Heather.”

Carrie does not in fact get alcohol poisoning that day, but she learns that she loves the edge of hyperactivity she gets from tequila, and that Maggie is much more fun when she’s drunk. 

“I had a great time today,” she says to Maggie as they climb into her twin bed that night, the room spinning slowly. “I felt like you were a real person.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Maggie asks, trying and failing to mask her hurt with mock anger. 

“I can’t explain now,” Carrie mumbles. “But it’s a good thing.” 

“Go to sleep, and if you throw up I’ll kill you,” Maggie orders tiredly. She turns so she and Carrie are facing opposite directions. 

Carrie touches her feet to Maggie’s, the closest approximation she can make to a hug since she doesn’t want to upend her equilibrium by flipping over. 

“Thanks for asking me to visit,” she whispers. “You’re my favorite sister.”

+++++

1997

Maggie paces around her childhood bedroom as she works up the courage to call Carrie at Princeton. Their father called her at school early this morning, hysterical, shouting something about their mom and a trip to CVS and a farewell note. She’d reluctantly skipped all her classes and borrowed her roommate’s car to drive the thirty minutes home from DC, wishing Carrie wasn’t away at school too so she could help calm their dad down. Maggie still gets nervous around her dad when he’s in one of his rages. She’s too logical, and it usually only serves to set him off more, but Carrie has always been able to tune in to his frequency more easily, to distract him enough so he can breathe.

She’d burst through the front door just an hour after receiving her dad’s phone call, unsure what to expect. 

“Dad?” she called, her voice tight with worry.

“In here,” his voice came from the living room, dazed. 

“What happened?” Maggie dropped her bag on the couch and sat down next to her father, who was holding a crumpled piece of notebook paper in his hand.

“Your mother went out to the store last night and never came home. I fell asleep early, so I thought she’d be back when I got up, but she wasn’t. I found this note on the kitchen table.” He thrust the crumpled paper in her face. 

It was torn off of the yellow legal pad they used to take down phone messages, and contained only a few lines: _I had to leave. I’m safe, don’t worry. Tell the girls I’m sorry._

“She left? Forever?” Maggie asked to confirm she was reading properly. It was like the plot to a Lifetime movie or something.

“I don’t know anything more than what’s written here,” her dad snapped back, agitated.

Maggie wasn’t really surprised that her mom wanted to leave — she’d been wondering if her parents would split up since she was old enough to understand what divorce was — but the timing was bizarre and cruel. 

“Did you call anywhere looking for her?” Maggie asked desperately.

“Did I call anywhere? Of course I did. I called her parents, her brother, her friends from the PTA, that cell phone she insisted on buying for emergencies. She didn’t answer the cell phone, and no one else has heard from her.” 

“Did you tell Carrie?”

“Tell Carrie what?”

“The same thing you told me, that Mom is gone, probably for good.” Maggie tried to keep the frustration out of her voice, knowing that it would only set off her father further, ranting about the whole family being against him. She was at a complete loss, with no idea how to handle any of this, and was just trying to come up with some path forward; phone calls would be easy enough to check off. 

“No, not yet. She just got to school, I’m sure she’s busy with all her orientation activities. I want to know more before I scare her.” 

Maggie was a little surprised at the lucid reasoning. But of course, there was no thought to what _she_ had going on that day or that week, always the responsible one, always the one who could fix things. She was jealous of Carrie’s ignorance, and wanted to let her remain that way for at least her first full day at college. She decided to call after dinner, though, knowing that Carrie would be furious if she hid it for an entire 24 hours. 

Now, she sits down on her bed, which still has her favorite stuffed animals from when she was ten, trying to figure out how she’s going to break the news to Carrie. She doesn’t relish the prospect of ruining her sister’s entire first semester, and has to keep talking herself into picking up the phone at all. 

Carrie’s dorm room landline rings for so long that Maggie starts to wonder if Carrie’s out at some orientation activity. She’d strategized that 9pm was probably later than any of the evening activities planned and not so late that Carrie wouldn’t want to answer the phone, but Maggie worries that she misjudged. She really doesn’t want to leave a message because she doesn’t have the mental capacity to compose something that’s not too alarming if Carrie’s roommate heard it, but urgent enough that Carrie actually calls back.

Carrie finally picks up the phone after what is probably the tenth ring. “Hello?” she sounds a little out of breath.

“Hey, it’s Maggie!” She forces herself to sound normal. “Do you have time to talk?”

“Hi!” Carrie’s voice brightens. “Sure, there are some icebreaker games going on outside, and I’d love to avoid them.”

“So everything’s going well on your first full day?” Maggie feels like she’s cheering on a five-year-old going to kindergarten. She picks at a hangnail as she cradles the phone to her shoulder, avoiding the inevitable for just a minute longer. 

“Yeah, I’ve mostly just been meeting hundreds of new people and doing terrible bonding activities. But everyone is nice so far, and I like my roommate.” 

Maggie’s chest gets tight as she listens to her sister describe the typical welcome-to-school info sessions, a mostly boring intro to what will certainly not be a boring day in the end. She tries to take a deep breath and has trouble, feels like her lungs stop halfway in protest. 

“Good, I’m glad,” she responds somewhat robotically to Carrie’s account. “I want to hear more later, but for now I have to tell you something.”

“Wait, what?” Carrie’s voice starts to quiver. Maggie imagines her toneless delivery — really the only thing stopping her from breaking down over the pressure of the day — isn’t reassuring. “Why didn’t you tell me that first?”

“I got a call from Dad at school this morning.”

“And what did he say?”

Maggie pauses before she gives the report she’d practiced before the phone call. “It looks like Mom is gone. She wrote Dad a note that she was leaving, and that she’s sorry. And she took a bunch of clothes with her.”

“Gone? Like she just moved out or she left forever? What the fuck?” Maggie can hear the tears in Carrie’s eyes. “Have you talked to her?”

“She didn’t leave a phone number. Dad and I have been calling all her friends all day, but no one knows where she is.” 

“So let me get this straight. She dropped me off at my dorm yesterday morning and then literally disappeared into the night?” 

Maggie wants to laugh at the absurdity of it all, but she stops herself. “Basically it seems that way, yes.”

“How could she do this? What was she thinking?” 

“We kind of knew they wouldn’t stay together forever,” Maggie reasons.

“Yes, we did, but not that she’d disappear without a trace! Aren’t you mad?” Carrie’s voice is too loud in her ear.

“I’m processing,” Maggie defends herself. “I need to think first.”

“How can you think anything through right now? You’ve had a whole day to process this. What are you even thinking _about_?”

“I don’t know,” Maggie answers honestly. “I’ll probably be upset tomorrow, but right now I’m in shock.” 

She’s actually enjoying the numbness for now because she knows it’ll feel better than the hurt and fury and guilt she should be feeling, that will eventually wake her up in the middle of the night and prevent her from falling back asleep. She’s always reacted like this, furious the day after a coach said something cutting to her in front of the entire team, composing a perfect follow-up argument in the shower two days after a lunch table dispute. Her feelings present themselves eventually, but it’s like they’re set on a time delay. She’s always envied how easily Carrie could access her emotions, even if it meant yelling at Maggie or their parents about a perceived slight without stopping to think.

“And how could you wait all day to tell me?” Carrie’s voice is high-pitched and desperate. 

“I didn’t know what you had going on today, and I didn’t know if I’d be able to reach you.”

Carrie scoffs. “Sure.”

“And I didn’t want to ruin your day!”

“Thanks so much for that! You definitely succeeded.”

“Are you okay?” Maggie asks hesitantly, pretty sure that’s something you’re supposed to say when you deliver bad news, check to see how the receiver is handling things. 

“No! I’m not okay! It’s my first day of college, my roommate could walk in any moment, our mother left and is totally unreachable, and you don’t even seem to care!” 

Maggie sighs deeply and flops down onto the bedspread, hugging a giant stuffed bear to her chest. She presses a thumb between her eyebrows to try to soften the hammer that’s threatening to split her skull open, but it doesn’t help. “Of course I care,” she almost whispers, drained. “I’ve been home all day helping Dad try to find her. I had to skip all my classes, which definitely means I won’t get into the genetics seminar I wanted to take, and I didn’t complain once.”

“Are you serious? You’re thinking about your science class right now? And by the way, telling me definitely qualifies as complaining about it.”

“I just wanted to tell you about all the bullshit I had to go through —”

“How are you making our mother abandoning us all about you?” Carrie’s voice is thick with disgust. 

If they were in the same room, Maggie probably would have smacked her, despite the fact that she’s a mostly grown adult. 

“First of all, this genetics class will make or break my first-semester thesis research, which will also probably make or break whether or not I get into med school. So it actually is important. And second of all, you don’t get to yell at me when I’ve been stuck handling Dad all day. He’s so stressed out that he cycles from furious to devastated back to furious every fifteen minutes.” 

Carrie ignores the med school comment, as Maggie knew she would, but the mention of their father seems to have calmed her slightly. “Should I try to talk to Dad?”

“I think he just got into bed. He’s been really out of it the past couple hours. But you should call first thing tomorrow morning.”

“I will,” Carrie promises.

Maggie’s pretty sure that come morning, Carrie will have something else pressing to take care of and will forget to call. But she also knows that Carrie really does mean her promise, at least for now. 

“Do you want to stay on the phone or do you want to go?” Maggie’s racking her brain for any vaguely comforting words she’d seen on TV. 

“I want to go. I need to be alone,” Carrie says, her voice breaking.

“Okay. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. If you need to call back tonight, don’t worry about waking me up.” 

“Thanks.”

“Bye,” Maggie says as they hang up. She flops back on her pillows and stares up at the crack in her ceiling that’s been slowly growing for years. She knows she’ll be sad later, tomorrow maybe, but for now she just feels as empty and disappointed as she always does after trying to resolve conflicts between her parents.

+++++

2013

Carrie picks up the phone three different times to cancel the visit she scheduled with Maggie, dreading the unavoidable: she has to tell her sister that she’s pregnant. The only reason why she doesn’t cancel is because she knows it’s the best day to break the news; she wants to be alone with Maggie, and Bill took the girls to see his parents for the weekend. According to her sporadic Google searches, she’s going to start showing for real any day now, and Maggie will never forgive her for keeping her pregnancy a secret for so long. 

Her hands are sweaty as she drives to Maggie’s house, and she has to keep wiping them off on her jeans so she can turn the steering wheel without it slipping dangerously. She’s nervous about springing the pregnancy on Maggie, obviously, but it’s more about the feeling that she’s done everything wrong, the knowledge that she’s not the daughter most parents would brag about during dinner parties. Sure, she has an exciting job that she’s really fucking good at, but no one outside her family is supposed to know she’s in the CIA, and it’s best to keep even her fake work life sounding ordinary. 

Maggie, on the other hand, is the dictionary definition of a woman who “has it all” — a phrase Carrie’s convinced was created by men to guilt ambitious women into having babies. She has a thriving medical practice, two tween daughters who aren’t spoiled brats, and a husband who’s a little boring but is a good guy: all the ingredients to suburban bliss, successfully building the stable home life she and Carrie didn’t have growing up. They weren’t raised in horror or anything, but having a bipolar dad and a mom who in hindsight always had one foot out the door certainly did a number on their mental health.

Maggie answers the door in running leggings and a t-shirt. “Hey,” she greets Carrie. “The house has been so quiet this weekend. I’m glad you’re here.”

_You won’t be in about ten minutes,_ Carrie thinks to herself.

“I’m making a smoothie, do you want one?” Maggie leads her into the kitchen. 

“That depends, what’s in it?” Carrie asks warily. Maggie somehow has the free time to search the internet for health food recipe blogs featuring ever-evolving horrific ingredients. She’s a suburban stereotype, but she’s so earnest about it that it’s hard to make fun of her without getting lectured about the latest nutrition literature; Carrie just has to be on the lookout for weird new foods.

“Just fruit and yogurt and milk.” She gestures to the banana and strawberries on the counter. Carrie tries to remember the last time she purchased fresh fruit, but she has no idea. She lies every time her OB asks her how many servings of fruits and vegetables she eats per week. She’ll probably have to start buying fruit when she’s a mom, though. 

“Sure, I’ll have one.” Carrie takes a seat at the kitchen island as Maggie starts cutting up the strawberries. She would have just thrown them into the blender whole, minus the stems, but maybe the sister who actually buys fruit knows best. 

She swings her feet in the air restlessly, looking at Josie’s spring lacrosse calendar taped to the fridge. 

“So,” she starts, wanting to tell Maggie while she’s occupied and can avoid direct eye contact. “I said on the phone I have some news.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m pregnant.”

There’s a clatter as Maggie misses the blender with the handful of ice cubes she’s holding. 

“What? I figured you were just going overseas again,” she gasps as she presses her hand to her shirt for relief from the cold, turning to face Carrie. She opens her mouth a couple of times before the doctor in her wins out. 

“How far along are you?” 

“About twenty weeks.”

“Twenty weeks? So you’re keeping it, then.” Maggie sinks into the chair next to her without cleaning up the ice cubes. 

“Of course I’m keeping it,” Carrie insists, stung. _If I weren’t keeping it, I wouldn’t be telling you,_ she adds in her head. 

“I’m just thinking out loud,” Maggie defends herself. “How did I not know this?”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.” Carrie really hadn’t planned on reverting to her petulant fourteen-year-old self, but it’s happening. 

“I just mean, you’re my sister, I’ve had babies. I should have noticed.”

“Yeah, well, there’s been a lot going on in my life lately,” Carrie snorts. 

“Oh, God,” Maggie sits up straight in her chair. “Your meds —”

“It’s okay, I’m not on lithium anymore, and my psychiatrist made a new treatment plan.” 

“Good. Okay.” Maggie presses hands over her eyes. “And you have an OB, and you’re taking vitamins and everything?”

“Yes, Maggie,” Carrie almost yells in frustration. “Of course I’ve seen a doctor! What kind of —” she almost says _mother_ but it doesn’t feel right in her mouth, her lips won’t separate to push the word out. “What kind of person do you think I am?”

“And this doctor says you’re healthy? And the baby’s healthy?”

“Yes, I promise.” She’s unbelievably lucky about that, the only element of this supremely cursed pregnancy that she can actually be happy about. 

“Great.” Maggie looks relieved. “So… who’s the father?” 

“How was that not your first question?” Carrie asks in disbelief. 

She used to think Maggie was rubbing it in when she asked Carrie to babysit the girls during almost every one of her and Bill’s wedding anniversaries, a not-so-subtle reminder that Carrie had no one but a fake engagement ring she used to actively avoid commitment. Eventually she realized Maggie probably just wanted to avoid having to shell out money to the teenage girl who lived three doors down, but it still felt like a dig all the same. 

“I’m a doctor,” Maggie shrugs, always so infuriatingly, unceasingly reasonable. “I have to think about the health of my patients first.”

Carrie had been dreading this part for months, and it was the real reason why she’d waited so long to tell people. She couldn’t imagine starting her answer with, _Remember that guy all over the news a few months ago? Who was accused of bombing Langley and killing hundreds of my colleagues? Well, he didn’t do that. But he did impregnate me!_ And now, of course, he’s gone for real, not just on the run, where she could conceivably find him through sheer force of will. 

“Um, a guy from work,” she chickens out, not knowing how to start, despite having had weeks to come up with a good answer.

“Do I know him?”

“You’ve never met him,” Carrie says carefully, avoiding the fact that yes, Maggie has definitely seen him all over the news, including his suicide tape. Technically Maggie also saw him in the parking lot of the local jail that time Dana had her arrested, but they didn’t speak, so Carrie thinks she can get away with her lie for now. She’ll tell Maggie eventually, she has to, but she can’t do it right now. She doesn’t have the energy for the confusion and the judgement and the knots she’ll have to tie herself into to justify her relationship with Brody.

“Well, when do I get to meet him?”

Oh. “You can’t, actually.” Carrie’s voice wavers and she takes a deep breath to calm herself. “He’s — he died, in the line of duty.”

Maggie’s face falls, her eyes turning soft with pity, which is exactly what Carrie doesn’t need if she wants any chance of getting out of here without crying. She’s extra glad that she’s not allowed to disclose identifying information about her colleagues. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”

They sit in silence for a moment. “Did he know about the baby, at least?” Maggie asks. 

“Yes, he did. And he was really excited.” Carrie blinks back tears, biting her tongue to control herself, remembering her conversation with Brody in the safe house in Iran.

She can tell Maggie wants to ask more questions about the father; her eyes are narrowed the way they are when she’s working something out in her head, but she doesn’t ask anything further. 

“Now I have a reminder of him. A permanent one.” Carrie tries to keep her voice steady.

“So we’re happy about this?” Maggie asks hesitantly. 

“Yes,” Carrie answers, a little surprised at her own decisiveness. “We are.” A strange peace had fallen over her on the plane back from Tehran, the knowledge that she could still hold onto a part of Brody holding her steady. If she couldn’t save Brody, at least she can keep his memory alive. She’s growing a person inside of her, no matter how much time she spent trying to avoid that fact, and right now it feels like the only sane thing left to hold onto.

“Okay!” Maggie is chipper at last. “Great! We’re happy!”

Carrie giggles in spite of herself. “We are,” she repeats, smiling to herself. 

Maggie starts asking about all kinds of details as she finishes making their smoothies: who is her OB and does she have ideas about her birth plan yet and does she want a list of the best clothing brands? The realization of everything she has in front of her is a little frightening, but Carrie refuses to let go of the warm glow inside of her. Maybe Brody isn’t truly gone after all.

“Thanks for being so nice about this,” Carrie says as Maggie walks her to the door an hour later. 

“Why, what did you think I would do?” 

“I don’t know, judge me for being single and mentally ill and, you know,” she gestures vaguely in the air, “me.”

“I really don’t understand why you always think the worst of me,” Maggie’s voice starts getting high-pitched, an unfortunate memory of their mother. 

Great, so she had successfully avoided a fight only to start another one. She sighs in defeat. “I don’t. I was kidding. It’s just that —”

“No, you do, you always think I’m the evil nag coming to tell you that everything you do is wrong, and it’s really annoying!”

“We don’t all get pregnant according to a schedule we planned out based on our med school coursework,” Carrie starts, trying to diffuse the tension, but Maggie interrupts her.

“I really hate it when you talk about me as the perfect mother.”

“Why is that bad?” Carrie asks, genuinely confused.

“It shows that you have no idea how much work goes into every single day of my life. I don’t just wake up every morning and wait for things to fall into place!”

“I didn’t say that. And I didn’t mean that!”

“Yes, you think I’m just better at everything than you are, that I’m somehow magically more functional, and it’s so deeply fucking exhausting!” Maggie’s face is turning red with anger. 

“Okay! Sorry!” Carrie gets defensive. “You’re not perfect at anything, is that what you want to hear?”

“No, not really.”

“Wonderful end to this visit,” Carrie says sarcastically. “Feel free to come over to my apartment, and we can do it all over again tomorrow. Now, I have to go eat some spinach, or something, and think about how pregnant I am.”

This seems to sober Maggie a little bit. “Fine, I overreacted.”

“No, really?”

“But you do always think I’m judging you.”

“Maggie! I don’t want to start.”

Maggie stops herself. “Okay. Go. Drive safely. And congratulations,” she says, as if realizing that she’d been missing the magic word. “I’m really happy for you.” 

“Thanks,” Carrie nods. She pulls her sister into a rare hug. “Now I have to figure out how I’m telling Dad.”

+++++

2014

Maggie lies on the couch in her living room, relishing the rare quiet in the empty house. Carrie took Franny out with her to run some errands, Ruby and Josie are at school, Bill is at work; for the first time in what feels like months, Maggie is home alone. She doesn’t pick up a book or the newspaper or turn the TV on, doesn’t even pretend to be productive, just closes her eyes and wills her head to stop pounding. She’s pretty sure she built up an Excedrin tolerance; the two extra-strength pills she took this morning are doing nothing to stop the headache she’s had for two straight days.

It’s hard for Maggie to believe that Carrie is back from Afghanistan for good, sent home for what she says are bullshit political reasons. But she’s here in Maggie’s house, trying to make up for six months of minimal contact. It’s obvious that Carrie feels awkward around Franny, who’s growing so quickly it’s surprising even Maggie. She’s becoming more of a real person every day, and with her hair and eyes she looks eerily like her father. Not that Carrie ever confirmed explicitly that Nicholas Brody was the father, but Maggie remembers the fever with which Carrie tried to clear his name after the CIA bombing, how withdrawn she was after her last trip to Iran. Her suspicions were confirmed when Franny was born, looking more like her father than his other two kids did when they were plastered all over the local news upon his homecoming three years ago.

Maggie knows it can’t be easy to lose the father of your child, and sometimes she wishes she could also run away to a job halfway across the world just to avoid her home life. She doesn’t blame Carrie for wanting to leave, not when she lies awake some nights and fantasizes about having even twelve uninterrupted hours to herself. But she does blame Carrie for seeming to forget she has a daughter for days at a time, for eternally ignoring her responsibilities and assuming Maggie will pick up the slack, as she’s always had to. 

She’s tired, and she’s angry, and she’s not sure whose fault that is: Carrie’s for not keeping her word, or her own for expecting that Carrie would ever change. She’d been so cautiously optimistic at Carrie’s pregnancy announcement, sure that it meant they’d see eye to eye suddenly, that motherhood would put them on equal footing. How very wrong she was. 

Maybe she should have just listened to Carrie’s third-trimester freakout that she wasn’t cut out to be a mom. But it’s too late for regrets now, with Franny getting closer to crawling every day. Maggie hopes that with Carrie back in DC, she can return to her original role as emotional support and backup babysitter. She loves Franny, that goes without saying, but when she congratulated her sister on her pregnancy all those months ago, Maggie didn’t imagine that she’d be raising the baby instead of Carrie. 

Maggie’s peace is soon disturbed by Ruby and Josie running in through the door, demanding an after-school snack, chattering about their days, and asking her to sign permission slips. The evening passes in its usual rush of activity, and the next time she can relax is when she’s sitting at the kitchen table after dinner, alone with a glass of wine.

Carrie comes into the kitchen just then. 

“Franny just went down for the night,” she says, setting the baby monitor on the counter. 

“You want some wine?” Maggie offers, signaling the empty glass next to her own. 

“Sure.” Carrie opens the fridge to find the bottle of white. 

“How was your day with Franny?”

“It was great, but long. It actually made me want to say a real thank you for all the work you’ve put in these past few months.” Carrie sits down next to Maggie, drawing shapes in the condensation on her glass. “I know I don’t say that enough.”

“No, you don’t,” Maggie agrees.

Carrie’s face falls slightly; she was probably expecting a warmer response. Maggie can’t bring herself to care. 

“You two are doing pretty well here without me,” Carrie continues. “I’m glad Franny has you.”

“What are you looking for right now?” Maggie asks roughly, not wanting to play Carrie’s polite houseguest game. “Do you want me to say that we both miss you all the time and Franny hasn’t been the same since you left? Because that’s not true.” 

“No, I was genuinely thanking you. For giving my daughter what I couldn’t give to her.” 

“You could have given her food and a room and a bed, if you really wanted to. You just chose not to.” 

“What is with you tonight?” Carrie starts to push back, probably deciding that she’s taken the requisite voluntary beating. “I told you, I don’t have to be here if it’s going to make you upset.”

“In what world would it make me feel better to see you leave my house and spend another night away from Franny?”

“Okay, fine, I’ll stay, but you certainly don’t seem happy to have me.” 

“I’m just so tired,” Maggie sighs. “All the time, I’m exhausted. I don’t have the energy to pretend to be happy that you’re visiting your daughter. I wish I had the option to see my kids on Skype only on alternating Saturdays, and in person every six months or so.” 

“Are you just going to yell at me? Because I’ll go upstairs if you are. You know I’m grateful for everything you’re doing for me.”

“You’ve said thanks a few times, sure. You send money, which is great. But you don’t seem to understand how much of a sacrifice this is for me.” 

Carrie has always painted herself as the long-suffering one, charging into war zones looking for terrorists, putting herself in danger for the greater good, or whatever, and Maggie’s pretty sure she thinks she’s above reproach in every other area of her life because of it. That her service and patriotism mean she’s exempt from all the basic social obligations, even taking care of her daughter. 

Carrie’s mouth falls open in anger. “Of course I understand! You never stop talking about it, how could I ever forget that you’re the perfect saintly sister?” 

Maggie laughs humorlessly. “You’re annoyed at me for talking too much about raising your daughter for you?”

“I’m sorry, okay? I get it, I’m a bad mother. I don’t know how I’ll ever make this up to you.”

“You don’t owe me. It’s not like I’m keeping score.” Maggie isn’t going to touch the _bad mother_ comment, not tonight at least.

“Right, because if you were keeping score, you’d be winning by a mile.” 

“Stop putting words in my mouth!” 

“Fine.” Carrie clenches her fists. “Why don’t you tell me what I can do, then?”

Maggie takes a deep breath to calm herself. “The only thing I want you to do is be here, from now on, as much as you can. You don’t have to beat yourself up or repay a debt. You just have to be with your daughter, who loves you and needs you.”

Carrie slouches back into her chair. “I can do that,” she says, exhausted but determined. 

Maggie nods happily, satisfied for now. She knows that nothing in Carrie’s life is ever as simple as saying she’ll be somewhere and then showing up there, but if she’s really back in DC for good, at least they’re making progress in the right direction.

+++++

2017

Carrie fumbles with her keys in the cold February frost, struggling to turn the key in the top lock to Maggie’s front door, which always sticks. She doesn’t think of it as her new home and probably never will; it’ll always be her sister’s house, even though she and Franny live here now. Temporarily, she’d insisted when she first broached the idea to Maggie, but Maggie actually seems to thrive with the extra people in the house, making endless lists of new things to buy for Franny.

Carrie has never felt smaller than she did when she had to move into Maggie’s house after getting fired by Keane, a house that Maggie owns personally with a giant back porch and yard, not a dusty, crumbling brownstone lent to her by her German benefactor/sugar daddy. It’s an eternal reminder of Maggie’s picture-perfect suburban existence, that her sister’s whole life has added up to so many concrete successes, whereas Carrie’s whole career just went up in flames after some malicious advice in President Keane’s ear. 

But Franny is happy to be back, constantly begging Josie to play games and watch movies with her. Carrie is surprised at the ease with which everyone folds Franny into the family unit, clearly resuming the routines they had after Carrie sent Franny home from Berlin. On this particular evening, Carrie finally opens the front door to hear the whole family around the dinner table, with Franny telling a story about her favorite teacher from preschool. 

The chatter subsides as she walks in, her coat still on. 

“Hey everyone,” she waves, feeling like she interrupted a moment she shouldn’t be there for. There’s a fifth place setting for her next to Franny, but she’d been out with sources trying to supplement Senator Paley’s investigation into Keane’s mass arrests and clearly missed the memo about dinnertime. 

“Hi,” Maggie says as she looks up from her glass of wine. “We would have waited for you, but I texted to ask when you were getting home and you didn’t answer.” 

Shit, she does remember opening a message from Maggie a couple hours ago, but she’d gotten a phone call right then and by the time she hung up, she’d forgotten. 

“Sorry,” she mumbles. “Dinner smells good, though.” 

“It’s still on the stove if you’re hungry.” 

Carrie finally takes off her coat and tosses it over the front staircase railing before going back in the kitchen to fill a plate with food.

“Hi, honey,” she says to Franny as she slides into the seat next to her. “How was school today?”

“It was fun! My teacher said I drew the best dog she ever saw.”

Carrie nods seriously, wishing that her only metric for a successful day was “drew a picture of a dog.” At least one of the Mathison girls had a good day. 

“Did you bring the picture home with you?”

“Aunt Maggie put it on the fridge!” Franny points triumphantly. Of course Maggie got there already. Carrie looks over and it’s a box with legs and eyes, no different from any other four-year-old’s drawing of a dog, but she oohs and ahhs anyway like she’s supposed to. 

After dinner, while Franny and Josie are playing cards in the living room, Maggie comes up to Carrie’s room to strategize about her upcoming trip to Bed Bath & Beyond to get some new things for Franny’s room. Carrie is in the middle of catching up on all the Keane-centric evening news coverage and is annoyed at the intrusion. 

“What do you need?” she asks, looking up from her laptop reluctantly. 

“I think it’s time to upgrade Franny from her toddler bed, so I was planning on picking out a new twin for her this weekend. She’s been asking if she can have a big-kid bed like Josie and Ruby have.” 

Carrie barely suppresses a sigh at this not at all urgent interruption, but she can’t blow off Maggie now after almost missing family dinner. “That sounds good to me. When this weekend are you going shopping?” 

“Probably Saturday morning, first thing. I have these options bookmarked, and I want to see what you think.” Maggie cycles through a few tabs on her own open laptop. 

“These all look almost identical to me.” 

“Well, some have wood frames, and some are metal, which are easier to put together but don’t look as nice.” Maggie has always been the kind of conscious shopper who makes pro/con lists for every big purchase, and it boggles Carrie’s mind every time. When Carrie was shopping for the last couch she bought in New York, she just sat on a few in West Elm that looked neutral and kid-resistant enough and picked the one that was most comfortable. 

Carrie stares back at her blankly. “Maggie, I’m very glad you’re doing this for Franny, but I swear to you, I don’t care which one you pick. I’m sure Franny will love any one she gets.” 

Maggie’s face shuts down. “I’m just trying to include you, so you’ll stop complaining about me never consulting you about anything.”

“Consider yourself off the hook for consulting me about bed frames, okay?” She really wants to get back to her nightly news scroll. She can feel herself making inroads with Paley’s chief of staff, and she needs to know who else could be open to a show of solidarity against the Keane administration. Something bigger is happening, she can feel it; that old buzz of conviction is drowning out everything else in her life.

“You don’t get to sit out of every parenting decision you don’t care about,” Maggie says, a dangerous edge to her voice. “Do you think I have strong feelings about bed frames?”

“Yeah, actually, you seem to. You always think of everything way before I do, since you’re the more experienced parent, and I just float around aimlessly, waiting for things to magically fix themselves.” 

“That’s not what I said!” 

“Well, it’s certainly what it sounded like.” 

“I’m trying to help,” Maggie says, defensive. “I don’t think I can do anything better than you, it’s just that you don’t seem to care how anything gets done.”

A weird side effect of living with Maggie is that Carrie regresses a little too much into the roles they had the last time they lived in the same house, with Maggie taking charge because she’s the oldest and feels like she should. Carrie hates that she lets it happen because she successfully parented Franny alone for the past three years, and now she looks like she doesn’t know how to make her kid dinner or buy her a bed that’s big enough for her. But it’s also so much easier to let Maggie take care of things, and Carrie’s been distracted the past few weeks with work, trying to free Saul and figure out why Keane turned on her. 

Not for the first time, Carrie wonders if Franny would be better off living with Maggie for good. It’s an idle thought, not one that she’ll ever say out loud, and God knows Carrie isn’t in a position to leave Maggie’s house anytime soon. But still, it keeps coming back to her at the worst times, when she’s late picking up Franny from school or forgets about her playdates; she’s constantly distracted, and exposing a corrupt presidential administration doesn’t leave a lot of mental capacity to remember Franny’s schedule, too. And because she has Maggie as backup, she usually doesn't need to. 

Carrie turns to face Maggie, who’s sitting on the edge of her bed with her laptop on the quilt in front of her. 

“If I come with you to pick out a bed this weekend, will you leave me alone?” she asks. “I’m trying to do work.”

Carrie can see Maggie swallow her _what work?_ retort as she answers, “Fine. But you’re not allowed to cancel.”

“Great. Can you close the door on the way out?”

Maggie walks out without saying goodnight, slamming the door closed with a little more force than necessary. 

Carrie takes a shaky breath as she wakes up her computer. She wanted to be better with Franny this time around than she was during her time in Kabul, to show Maggie that she’s stable and capable and everything she hadn’t known how to be while she was still in the CIA. But she can feel the layers of conspiracy reeling her in slowly, a puzzle only she can solve. She’s starting to feel like herself again, uncovering something massive, and if Franny is happy and taken care of, why shouldn’t she indulge that feeling? 

+++++

2020

Maggie receives a copy of Carrie’s book in the mail from Amazon, pre-ordered by Josie and sent to the house for her. Maggie opens the package assuming it’s the new lunch box she’d ordered for Franny, but she gasps in surprise at her sister’s face on the jacket cover. The receipt has a message included in the “A Gift For You” section: _I knew you wouldn’t buy it yourself, so here you go. —Josie_

“What’s wrong?” Franny asks, concerned, as she eats her after-school snack at the kitchen table. 

“Nothing, honey,” Maggie answers as she closes the box, grateful she hadn’t been sitting next to Franny while she opened it. Franny is always worried about people’s feelings, never wanting to start a fight or disagree with the family’s general consensus. She could use some of Josie’s purposeful march towards conflict. 

Maggie goes upstairs to call Josie at Barnard about the surprise package. 

“Hi, Mom,” Josie answers the phone, the sound of car horns in the background threatening to drown her out. 

“Hi, Josie. Can you hear me?” Maggie hates that she talks on the phone while walking down the street, always convinced she’ll miss something important amidst all the distractions.

“Yes, of course.” Maggie can picture her rolling her eyes.

“I got the book you sent me.”

“Oh! Great! That was fast.” A door slams in the background and Josie’s voice is suddenly clearer. “So did you start reading it yet?” 

“I told you I didn’t want to.” 

“Yeah, but I thought you were just being stubborn.” Josie suddenly sounds unsure of herself. 

“No, I wasn’t,” Maggie can’t keep the edge out of her voice. “When I tell you no, I need you to understand it the first time.” 

“Okay, God, excuse me for trying to be helpful. I just don’t get why you don’t want to know what Aunt Carrie wrote.”

“Have _you_ read it yet?” 

Maggie can hear keys jingling as Josie presumably unlocks her dorm room door. “No, I reserved a copy from a local bookstore, but their shipment has been delayed a few days. I’m supposed to get mine the day after tomorrow. Fucking Amazon, reserving the whole stock for themselves.”

“Don’t use the word fuck,” Maggie scolds absently.

“Mom, you swear all the time. And you just said it too.”

“Well, that doesn’t mean you should. I’m just distracted.”

“Thinking about Aunt Carrie?” Josie asks hopefully. 

Maggie takes a deep breath. “Yes.” 

“You never talk about her anymore. You just shut down. And Franny feels scared to bring her up.”

“What?” Maggie feels like she got punched in the stomach. “How do you know that?”

“Franny told me. She said you always look really sad when she mentions Aunt Carrie, and she doesn’t like upsetting you.”

“I do not,” Maggie protests feebly, trying to recall the last conversation she had with Franny about Carrie. For a six-month period after Saul delivered the news that Carrie was in Russia under asylum protection, Franny kept asking where her mom was and when she was coming back, like she could just sense something terrible had happened. She’d seemed satisfied for a while at Maggie’s repeated assurances that Carrie had to stay in Europe for important work, but that Maggie and Bill and Ruby and Josie were going to be there to take care of her. Franny talked about Carrie only rarely after those first few months, but Maggie assumed she was just growing accustomed to life with her aunt and uncle, not that she’d been too scared to ask questions.

“And whenever I try to bring her up, you say that you’d really rather not talk about her, but in your tone that means no arguing allowed. I just want to understand why you never talk about her. Do you hate her guts? Are you secretly communicating with her through her spy friends and you don’t want the FBI to find out?” Josie has always been the daughter most likely to annoy the truth out of her. 

“Jo,” Maggie sighs. “It’s very complicated.”

“Mom!” Josie almost yells. “I’m a grown-up, you can tell me what you’re thinking.”

Maggie lets out a slightly hysterical giggle. “You’re nineteen years old, honey.”

“Please? Can you try to explain it to me?”

“Fine,” Maggie concedes. “I’ll try.” 

“Thank you!”

“I feel a lot of things about Aunt Carrie. I feel disappointed that we didn’t get to say a real goodbye to her.” She omits the fact that Carrie was in DC between Germany and Russia and chose not to say goodbye. “I feel frustrated that she always felt so drawn to the CIA when it’s clear there’s a lot of danger involved. I feel sad for Franny, who hasn’t seen her mother in three years and doesn’t know if she’ll ever see her again. I’m especially sad because I know what that feels like. But I’m also proud that Carrie has done so many important things for the country and the world.”

“God, Mom, you’re always so clinical. It’s like you’re listing out flu symptoms,” Josie groans. “Even about your runaway sister who’s living in Russia because she had to break spy code to prevent an entire war in Pakistan.”

“You really haven’t read the book yet?”

“No, I’ve just been following all the press releases,” Josie admits. “That’s the hook in all the reviews I’ve read.” 

“I’m glad the book is out, and I want to read it someday, I think. But I can’t read it now.”

Josie is quiet on the other end of the line, a rare occurrence. “Okay, but that doesn’t explain _why_ you can’t read it,” she says finally. 

“We should set you up with a CIA recruiter,” Maggie sighs, exhausted. “You’d be a great interrogator.”

“I’m pretty sure Aunt Carrie’s book is about why I shouldn’t want to join the CIA,” Josie dismisses her. “And I think it might give you some closure. You should try it.”

“All right,” Maggie relents, torn between being proud that she raised such an assertive daughter and wishing she was in the same room as Josie so she could throttle her. She can’t bring herself to say, _I’m jealous that she can do whatever she wants and doesn’t care if other people think she’s terrible. I’m sad because I lost the last remaining member of my family and if I open this book I think I’ll start crying and never stop._ “I’ll let you know if I read it.”

She hangs up with Josie and goes to pull the book back out of its Amazon box when she hears Franny calling up the stairs. 

“Aunt Maggie? Can you help me with my math homework?” 

“Be right down!” Maggie responds, leaving the box in the middle of the bed for now. She forgets about it in the rush of helping Franny and making dinner, but comes back upstairs after eating to find Bill reading the summary on the book flap with interest. 

“Dishes are still in the sink,” she reminds him as she flops down on the bed.

“I’ll do them soon,” he nods, which means it’s a 50/50 shot that he actually will. “I thought you didn’t want this in the house.” He holds the book up to clarify.

“Josie sent it. Without telling me beforehand.”

“It sounds interesting,” he says carefully.

“I have no problem with you reading it! I just don’t want to!” 

“Maybe it’ll help you forgive her,” Bill suggests.

“Oh my God.” Maggie pulls a pillow over her face. “Are you and Josie working together to break me or something? I’m not mad at her. You always had that covered enough for both of us.” _Mad_ feels so reductive, and not nearly nuanced enough to describe her current relationship to her sister, which she has no intention of rehashing right now. 

Bill nods in defeat and gets up to put the book on his shelf, spine facing inwards. “So Franny doesn’t see,” he explains. 

They’ll have to come up with a plan to figure out how to tell her about the book, but that can wait until after Maggie reads it.

After weeks of nervously avoiding it, Maggie pulls the book out one night when she’s the only one upstairs. Her breath catches in her throat at the cover photo, at the sight of Carrie looking so raw and open. She pulls the jacket off the book and stores it deep in the drawer of her nightstand for later, when she can stomach it. 

She only intends to read a chapter or two, noting the timeline in Carrie’s table of contents, starting with her recruitment at Princeton and jumping swiftly to 9/11. But she’d forgotten just how curious she used to be about Carrie’s CIA career, even the tiny details. And it’s a good memoir, a nice balance of relatable personal stories about her first few months in agency training, enough of a whiff of juicy workplace gossip that keeps you following for want of more, though if Maggie knows Carrie at all she won’t actually reveal anything concrete, and cold hard facts relayed in an easily digestible manner: about power structures in the CIA and the military, about past US involvement in Afghanistan, about Al Qaeda and the Taliban. 

But the thing that keeps Maggie reading above all else is that it sounds exactly like her sister. Carrie had always been better with her words, using them to debate and analyze and manipulate, and Maggie can hear every word on the page like she’s speaking it. The book speeds quickly through the 2000s, and begins a new section with an ominous quote: “An American prisoner of war has been turned.” 

The references to Nicholas Brody make Maggie sit back in her chair. There’s nothing overtly romantic about the way Carrie talks about him, but with the knowledge of the barest outline of their history, Maggie can pick out details that only a former lover would care enough to include: his favorite brand of tea, that he was born in the desert. Not the typical “raised in Falls Church, Virginia” way, but as a way to establish his character, the pattern of his life. He was born in the desert, he was broken in the desert, and he died in the desert. Carrie never said much to her about Brody, and Maggie doesn’t really blame her for that. But she has to laugh that Carrie reveals more about Franny’s father in this book that will be read by thousands of people than she ever did to her own sister.

Of course, Franny isn’t connected to Brody outright, since the book doesn’t allude to a sexual relationship at all, but Maggie suspects anyone who works in or adjacent to the CIA has heard the gossip by now. The Brody section finally lays out the redemption arc that Maggie had heard her manically muttering about in the months after the CIA bombing: he chose not to betray his country, he was framed on 12/12, but he died a hero in the line of duty after completing a vital mission for the CIA. 

Maggie suspects this is for Franny, later on. 

Bill notices the book sitting on her nightstand as they get ready for bed. “So you started reading?” He tries to be supportive, but in this case has no idea how. “How is it so far?”

“It’s fine,” Maggie responds, but adds nothing else, turning away from him under the covers. She’s processing. She hadn’t felt anything she thought she would while reading the book; there’s none of the anger or resentment that she expected would bubble up. She actually feels closer to Carrie, getting a glimpse of the covert operations that consumed so much of her sister’s life, that she couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about with the family. She knows Carrie is revealing important information about the CIA, information that could potentially start real reform, but she can’t focus on that yet, just concentrates on Carrie’s emotional throughline: she was so good at her job, and it made her whole.

When she finally finishes, after a long pause before Carrie’s 2017 trip to Moscow, she calls Josie. 

“I finished Aunt Carrie’s book,” she reports her triumph.

“It only took you, like, two months,” Josie responds. “I already read it three times, and talked to Ruby all about it.” 

“I told you I was doing it at my own pace.” But in a tone that she hopes communicates, _Shut up, dearest daughter._

“Well, what did you think? I think she’s a hero. And I hope the CIA is imploding right now because of what she wrote.”

Maggie smiles at Josie’s naive idea that the CIA would implode from one tell-all book. “I wouldn’t go that far. But I do understand Carrie more now.”

“That’s it?” Josie is audibly disappointed. “You were freaking out about this book, you refused to read it for weeks after you had it, and now you just say it made you _understand_ Aunt Carrie?”

“Jo,” Maggie sighs. “I’m trying to talk to you like another adult. You don’t have to be a brat.” 

“Fine. Can you explain what you mean? Please?”

“All throughout our lives, I usually had no idea what Aunt Carrie was thinking at any given time. I might be able to guess how she would react to something, but I wasn’t always right, and I didn’t always know why. We were just very different people.”

“Aunt Carrie was like Grandpa?”

“Yes. And I was more like my mother, who usually had a slightly firmer grasp on reality. But Aunt Carrie made a lot of big decisions that I could never understand, and that she never explained to me.”

“Like having Franny?” Josie asks quietly.

Maggie stops to consider. “No. Her decision to have Franny made sense to me because it was an experience I shared. I had kids and I loved my kids and I always thought that if Aunt Carrie could slow down for long enough, she could have and love kids of her own. But then she had Franny, and she didn’t slow down. And that’s the part I didn’t understand. I thought the baby was like her version of a white flag, a step back from her work, and I thought it would calm her down.” 

“But it didn’t.” Josie states the obvious.

“It didn’t. But now I see why she couldn’t slow down. Her job was like a calling, or something.” Maggie feels silly saying it out loud, but that’s what she got from the book, the sense that Carrie truly thought her CIA work was preordained, like the planets were aligned only when she was chasing down intelligence, trying to protect the country. 

She’s always thought of Carrie as the one who shirked responsibility, the typical younger sister always breaking curfew and not taking care of her expensive clothes and trusting Maggie to clean up her messes for her. And clearly, when it comes to her daughter, that is still true. But at least now it’s clear that Carrie spent her life reserving her energy to save the world. Of course, Maggie has always known intellectually that Carrie did important work. Their dad never let her forget it, spending the first year that Carrie was at the CIA joking that every request she made was a matter of national security. And of course, she always knew Carrie was great at her job, born for it even, fearless, determined, unstoppable. But still, Maggie used to think to herself, _Sure, someone has to defend the country from terrorists, but does it have to be my sister?_

But her understanding is more personal now, more specific. It’s the delicacy and ambiguity of intelligence work that are attractive, not just the bone-chilling danger. Even though Maggie goes to bed most nights worrying about her own fix-it protective coping mechanisms manifesting in her quiet, conciliatory niece, she finally gets why Carrie left. She doesn’t agree with her sister’s choices, but she can follow her logic, where as apocalyptic as it sounds, Carrie really was the only person in the world equipped to prevent a war with Pakistan. She just had to betray her country and her family in order to do it.

“You’re right.” Josie’s voice interrupts her thoughts. “It really was her calling.” 

They sit quietly together for a moment. 

“I think you should start talking about Aunt Carrie more to Franny,” Josie says, as gentle as Maggie’s ever heard her. 

“I wasn’t avoiding her on purpose,” Maggie protests, defensive.

“I’m not saying you were. But Franny likes it when I remind her of all the places she’s lived and all the fun things she did with Aunt Carrie. She doesn’t always bring her up, but she asks a million questions, especially about Germany. She remembers that she had fun, but not the details.” 

Maggie nods, knowing Josie can’t see her, but she’s at a loss for words.

“Mom?”

“Okay,” she manages. “I’ll keep talking about Carrie.”

The next morning, she digs around through Carrie’s things gathering dust in storage to find framed photos of her and Franny in Berlin: looking at giraffes at the zoo, grinning in front of the entrance to a Christmas market during a snowfall, Carrie wearing a balloon animal hat with Franny on her lap. Maggie brings everything up to Franny’s room and lays the frames out on her dresser, ready to answer all the questions she can.

**Author's Note:**

> Based on Ruby and Josie’s ages, Maggie is probably more than three years older than Carrie but it’s my Mathison Family Extended Universe and I can do what I want!
> 
> Also, a headcanon that only I care about: Maggie named Josie after Jo from Little Women but didn’t want to force the nickname. I guess in this universe someone else played Beth in the 1994 movie! Josie prefers the 2019 adaptation though because Greta Gerwig went to Barnard. 
> 
> The title is a line from Supercut by Lorde.
> 
> Thanks for reading as always!


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